Less poor but hungrier
India was ranked 102 among 117 countries on the Global Hunger Index 2019, but it has slipped five positions, to 107 out of 121 countries, in the latest report, released last week. This was followed by good tidings offered by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which revealed that since its last report of 2019, 14.4 crore Indians had been lifted out of poverty. But the numbers don’t quite square up — how could India fall five rungs on the hunger index if 14.4 crore of its people were lifted out of poverty in the same time frame? The hunger index methodology was criticised by India but the UNDP Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report — which shows that overall, India lifted 41.5 crore people out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21 — comes as welcome news.
An examination of the reports provides clues to understanding the contradictions. UNDP’s MPI report does not consider the effects of the Covid pandemic on poverty in India — this is so because 71% of the data from the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21) used in MPI was collected before the pandemic. The World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report, released earlier this month, estimated that out of seven crore people who fell into extreme poverty across the world in 2020, Indians accounted for 5.6 crore. The government has not published data on poverty since 2011-12, and the World Bank used survey reports of an independent research group. Also, UNDP’s methodology goes beyond mere finances and includes factors such as health, nutrition, access to clean water, electricity and education, and quality of work to provide a bigger picture of the state of poverty; significantly, India had done relatively well in health and access to clean water and electricity before the pandemic struck, leading to a better MPI score.
Though the government has tried to pick holes in the methodology, the fact is that it has had to provide additional foodgrains — flour or rice, and whole chana — to 80 crore people since March 2020 to help them deal with the economic devastation caused by the pandemic. Also, as experts point out, good nutrition depends not on quantity but on quality. While there may be reasons to quibble over terms such as ‘hunger’ or ‘nutrition’, the upshot of the reports is that India still has the world’s largest number of poor and the highest number of malnourished children.
